The Fleeting Moment
by frilencer
Summary: Tony and Ziva are stuck in a house during New Year's Eve and Tony is desperate because he can't follow the countdown. This situation will lead them to talk about resolutions and changes in life.


**Hi everyone! It's New Year's Eve and it's the right time to post this oneshot I wrote some days ago :)**

**I've chosen "Friendship" as genre, but "Romance" can be found between the lines and mostly in what _I_ meant to express writing some of the sentences here. Just so you know :)**

**Anyway, I hope you'll like this! **

**I didn't get NCIS for Christmas so I still don't own anything.**

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><p>"I hate snow," Tony declared, staring out the window, discouraged: the path that led to the house had disappeared under a thick blanket of snow, and so had the whole yard that surrounded the building. It was extremely dark outside and Tony could barely see the branches of the trees, which were overloaded by snow and looked like they could break any time soon. "The one time we don't have to work during a holiday and we have the night free, we are stuck here."<p>

Ziva raised her gaze a little and looked at him with an amused smirk. "Look at the bright side of the situation, Tony. We don't have Russians mercenaries looking for us, this time."

Tony nodded, without moving his eyes from the window. "Nor do we have to worry about a woman who might possibly be soon going into labor." He turned towards Ziva and looked at her with a grin on his face. "Unless you're hiding something from me."

She gave him a provocative look and made herself comfortable on the couch before going back to read her book.

"Why did you even have that book with you?" Tony asked her, approaching the couch. "Do you always keep it in your backpack?"

Ziva smirked. "Yes, I do. You never know what is going to happen, and It is a good precaution to bring something you might use in case of some… free time." While speaking, she never raised her eyes from the book.

Tony snorted and started wandering around the living room, casting glances at her every now and then. At one point, exasperated, he walked to Ziva and grabbed the book from her hands. She immediately protested and stretched out her arm to take the book from his hands, but he was now hiding it under his jacket.

"Give the book back to me," she ordered him, with a threatening look.

"Come on, stop reading and help me find a television," he replied, looking at her.

"A television? Why would you need a television?" she asked him.

"To watch the countdown, of course."

"The countdown?" she repeated, frowning.

"Yes, it's New Year's Eve, don't you remember? We need the countdown."

"Oh, right, the countdown." She shrugged. "Well, I doubt you will find a television anywhere here. The man who lived here was living kind of an… "eremitic experience", as I recall."

"There's no way he didn't have a TV."

Ziva watched him look around the small house, entertained by his determination. She was still sitting on the couch but she didn't mind not having the book with her anymore: watching Tony was much more fun.

"I can't believe it," he said eventually grumbling. "There is not a single TV in this house!"

"What did I tell you?" she asked with a smirk.

He ignored her words and kept moaning. "How will I follow the countdown now? How will I know when 2012 starts?"

"Don't you have a watch or something?" she asked, exasperated.

"I do, but it's not the same."

"Why?"

"The time is not right. My watch is some seconds early, or maybe late, I don't remember."

"Well, a few seconds is not a big deal."

"It is!" he burst out. "I need to know the exact time, the _exact _second when the year changes. It's a matter of life and death, don't you understand?"

"Actually, I don't. I can't see what difference it would make to know the _exact _second, to be there and see the date change."

"There is a _big _difference, Ziva. Not once in my life wasn't I there looking at the countdown reaching the three, and then the two, and the one, and then showing the writing "Happy 2011", or "Happy 2012", or what else. Not once." He raised one of his fingers to underline what he was saying.

Ziva frowned and smiled, lightly amused. "Okay."

He turned and moved around anxiously, looking for something he knew he would never find there.

"Would you stop? You are giving me a headache," she spoke up.

"I can't! I need to find a solution. Midnight is in a few minutes. I can't accept the fact that I won't be there for _the _moment."

"_The _moment?"

"Yes! The moment when the year changes, the moment when a new year begins and you can change your life, start anew, do something you have always wanted to do. That moment, _the _moment," he explained, moving around rapidly.

"I do not understand. Why would you need _that _particular moment to change your life? Why not any other moment?" she asked confused.

"I don't know, Ziva, maybe… maybe because it makes you think, I don't know, okay? It makes you think about the year that has passed and about what you did right, what you did wrong, what you would like to stop doing, what you would like to start doing, how you would want your life to change. It's that moment when you say _Okay, from now on, it's a new life, a new story. I'm going to be better. I'm going to do something to make my life better. _That moment."

She nodded at his words and stayed silent for a while."And… what are you going to do? " she asked him in the end. "To… "change your life"."

He giggled. "It you think I will ever reveal you my New Year's resolutions, you are making a big mistake."

"So, you have New Year's resolutions…?"

"You don't?"

She didn't answer, just smiled. There was another pause of silence and she observed him move to the window and look out, probably praying to have the ability of melting snow with his gaze.

"Are New Year's resolutions similar to… a bucket list?" she asked after a while.

He waited a few moments before speaking. "No, not really," he answered.

"What's the difference?"

"A bucket list is like a list of wishes. New Year's resolutions are more… concrete."

"So you are saying the things you wrote in your bucket list… they are never going to happen?"

"I'm not saying this. I'm saying… " he paused. "They are different, it's hard to explain."

She stared at his back. "I like New Year's resolutions more."

"Really? Why?" he asked, absent-mindedly.

"More concrete, like you said. They represent something you want to do soon. It's better than inserting items in a list of things you must do once in your life: you don't know how long you're going to live and you might procrastinate your dreams for too long until you realize you have no time left to actually _do _what you proposed doing. New Year's resolutions, on the other hand, require quicker actions. You already know how much time you are given to make those wishes become true – 365 days, or 366 days in this case – and you must start right away if you want to actually _change _something."

He didn't say anything back for a while and kept staring at the snow falling to the ground. She could say he was thinking about something important, something he had been thinking about a lot during the past few months.

At some point, though, he turned and smiled at Ziva. She looked at him confused and observed him approaching her. When he was right in front of her, only a few inches apart, he asked, with a grin, "What are your New Year's resolutions?"

She chuckled. "I never said I had any."

He sat on the couch next to her. "Okay, suppose that it's true… You can find some now."

She narrowed her eyes and looked at him.

"Come on, it's going to be fun!"

"And what tells you that I'm going to reveal youmy _real_ resolutions?"

"What do you mean? You would tell me something that it's not real and keep your real resolutions for yourself?"

"I might."

"That's not the spirit of this game!"

"I didn't realize we were playing."

"Well, we kind of are, it's the New Years' resolutions game and you're in it now, so you have to play. Withholding information doesn't follow the rules of this game."

"Okay, but it follows the rules of New Year's resolutions, right? Isn't it in the spirit of resolutions, to keep them for yourself? They are about you and what you want to do, after all. It doesn't involve other people."

"There is nothing wrong in revealing them to someone else, though," Tony replied.

"Then tell me yours."

"Never."

"Then I'm never going to tell you mine." She concluded with a grin.

Tony looked at her silently, then his face lit up. "So you do have some resolutions, otherwise you could not "never tell me anything" because you wouldn't have anything to tell me in the first place."

Ziva looked confused. "I'm not following."

"I'm just proving that you have New Year's resolutions," Tony explained, proud of himself.

She shook her head and looked away from him, with a smile on her lips. She stared out the window for a while, until she felt Tony move beside her. She turned quickly, on the alert, and saw Tony placing his arm on the back rest of the couch. She smiled at him and turned a little more, in order to face him properly.

"You know, Ziva, I was thinking…" he paused for a moment."Maybe I'm going to move some things from my bucket list to my New Year's resolutions list."

She raised her eyebrows and smiled.

"I want… to act quicker," he explained, smiling back at her.

She nodded. "I think it's the right thing to do."

He looked at her intensely, and Ziva smiled again, then moved her gaze away, unable to sustain his any longer.

"Hey look, Tony," she then said, observing the watch on his left arm. "We missed it."

Tony looked confused for a moment, then he followed her eyes and looked at the watch. When he saw that it was already past midnight he opened his mouth and stared, shocked. After a while he composed himself and shrugged, pretending not to care about it that much. "It's okay, it's just one of the many seconds."

Ziva chuckled. "Is it?"

Tony looked at her and smiled. "Of course not."

Many hours later, Ziva opened the door and entered her home, welcomed by a pleasant warmth. She smiled, pulled off her coat and went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of hot chocolate. While waiting for the water to boil, she looked at the cupboard and saw a picture of Ray and herself, and a collection of photos taken during the Thanksgiving dinner the team had had together more than a year before. She had many pictures of that day, but her favorite one was the one in which there were Tony and her together. The thing she loved the most about that photo was that it was the only one that had been taken without the two subjects "posing": it was spontaneous and it caught them laughing with each other on the couch.

Her mind went back to the conversation she had had with Tony a few hours before, and she smiled. Then, without even realizing what she was doing, she took a post-it and a pen, and looked at the bright yellow sheet of paper in front of her eyes. She thought for a moment, just for a moment, and that was _the _moment for her.

She took the cap off the pen and wrote down her New Year's resolution:

_Understand what I really want, find it and make it permanent._

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><p><strong>You would make me happy if you left a review to this oneshot. Really happy.<strong>_  
><em>


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